Rate My Professor Marco Mielcarek

Dr. Marco Mielcarek, MD, PhD, serves as Professor in the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Medical Director of the Adult Blood and Marrow Transplant Program there, Affiliate Investigator in the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division at Fred Hutch, and Professor in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is a board-certified medical oncologist with over 20 years of experience treating patients undergoing stem cell transplants for blood cancers. Mielcarek earned his MD in 1986 and PhD in 1987 from Freie Universität Berlin School of Medicine in Germany. He completed internal medicine residency at Freie Universität Berlin from 1987 to 1993 and at the University of Washington from 1998 to 2000, followed by a medical oncology fellowship at the University of Washington/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center from 2000 to 2003. Originally arriving in Seattle in 1994 for a research fellowship at Fred Hutch, he chose to stay in the United States to pursue both patient care and research.

Mielcarek's research centers on preventing and treating graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), a serious complication after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation where donor immune cells attack the recipient's tissues. He and colleagues have conducted clinical trials demonstrating that high-dose posttransplantation cyclophosphamide safely prevents GVHD following growth factor-mobilized blood stem cell transplantation. His team showed that lower doses of prednisone effectively treat acute GVHD without compromising outcomes. Key publications include "Posttransplantation cyclophosphamide for prevention of graft-versus-host disease after HLA-matched mobilized blood cell transplantation" (Blood, 2016), "Long-term outcomes after transplantation of HLA-identical related G-CSF–mobilized peripheral blood mononuclear cells versus bone marrow" (Blood, 2011), and studies exploring donor statin treatment to protect against severe acute GVHD. In 2011, he received a $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to advance GVHD research. As Medical Director, Mielcarek oversees efforts to enhance transplant program outcomes, which have been nationally recognized, and integrates cutting-edge clinical trials into patient care to make treatments more tolerable.